Tagging Classical Music:Part 2 - A Sensible and Configurable Track Artist

Go back to Tagging Classical Music Part 1
Go Forward to  Part 3:More fields required

We saw in TPart 1 how the Track Artist provided by MusicBrainz is great for Pop/Rock music but not for Classical music and in Part 3: we see how the standard metadata specification is somewhat lacking for Classical music.

What is Classical Music ?

To be able to do something clever for Classical music first of all we need to identify what is Classical music. The definition is not clear cut but SongKong uses various heuristics to try identify if a song is Classical, these include considering the composer (if any), the level of works, acoustic analysis, the record label, identification of orchestras and choirs in the performers and text analysis of the release and song title. We build a probability based on all these factors and if the probability is high enough the track is marked as IsClassical

Note:However it should be said if you have no Classical music or do not want to treat your Classical Music differently you can disable this by disabling the Automatically Identify Songs that are part of Classical releases and apply those changes option on the Classical tab

A Configurable Track Artist

Once a track is defined as being Classical the Classical options within SongKong come into effect. The MusicBrainz Track Artist option allows you to configure from a number of different options, the default is Performers and Choir/Orchestra/Ensemble and Conductor - note the Composer is not included.

SongKong then builds this track artist by looking at the Track Artist Credits, Recording Artist Credits, Release Artist Advanced Relationships and Recording Artist Advanced relationships. 

It also does additional text based analysis, to take a very simplistic example if there is artist credit containing the word Orchestra in the title then that artist would be considered to be an orchestra even if there is no performing orchestra advanced relationship for this track.

Another example is that we have identified over 3000 Classical composers that died before 1900, we can be mostly sure that if one of these artists is credited on a track that their role was composer rather than performer even if there is no composer credit listed.

The data is not always complete but by using the above techniques we can usually create a track artist credit that matches the option chosen.

Go back to Tagging Classical Music Part 1
Go Forward to  Part 3:More fields required